


Four Times Jack Cried and One Time He Didn't

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 5 Things, Community: sg1_five_things, Episode Related, Episode: s01e07 Cold Lazarus, Episode: s02e07 Message in a Bottle, Episode: s05e21 Meridian, Episode: s06e06 Abyss, Episode: s07e21 Lost City (1), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-03
Updated: 2006-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:30:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian





	Four Times Jack Cried and One Time He Didn't

He cried when the thing from P5C-353 had him skewered to the wall. It was just water coming out of his eyes, an autonomic pain response he was more than familiar with, until it came through the haze of exhaustion and agony and the creep of metallic sentient _stuff_ into his brain that Teal'c ... well, he didn't have words for what Teal'c was doing, the profoundly moving way that Teal'c was standing by him, but when Teal'c made him laugh -- yeah, he cried.

He cried when Daniel walked through the mental construct of a stargate out into the spectral plane. Daniel didn't see it, because he'd turned his back, taken that final step, and gone from Jack's reach. The tears were no more than Daniel had shed, not shed at all in fact, just moisture and a reddening of the eyes, and for all he knew his were just a reflex reaction to Daniel's, some primate response, like catching a yawn. Daniel was the anthropologist; Daniel was the one who could have answered that question. But Daniel was gone, and it was all in Jack's mind anyway, and he doesn't remember, and never will.

He cried the next-to-last time Ba'al tortured him to death. Those were pain-reflex tears too, trickling sideways because of the fucked-around gravity. The ones when he woke up in the sarcophagus again weren't; they were the dry, brittle tears of hellish futility, the silent, racking, body-wrenching sobs of being broken but not broken enough not to know it.

He cried after the second time he took the upload of an Ancient database. When he got home that night, he sat on the sofa, put his elbows on his knees, put his forehead in his hands, and watched droplets fall onto the floor between his feet, little ticking sounds, like an arrhythmic clock. He'd watched his mother die of Alzheimer's. It took ten years for the disease to strip all the pages from her librarian's encyclopedic mind. It probably felt a lot like what he'd feel, tomorrow or the next day or the next. He'd always had a terror of going the way she went. Compared to that, this was a bullet in the head, quick and clean. He was lucky. He knew it. He wasn't crying for himself.

He didn't cry when Charlie died. He didn't cry when he found him in the master bedroom, still breathing even with half his head blown away onto his and Sara's bed; he didn't cry in the hospital hallway, legs giving way, sliding down the wall, slumping over his knees, puking; he didn't cry when they put his little boy in the ground. The crystalline entity cried; Sara told him that, later. It wasn't the same. It didn't release the tears inside _him_. Not those tears. Nothing could.


End file.
